“I never intended her any harm. I didn’t tell Leon about her as a way to punish her. It was just because I believe honesty is important in a relationship, and he had a right to know. But even so, I feel I did her wrong somehow. I never considered her to be a demon. She was too sweet for that.
“So when you lot arrived, I was wary at first. Five of you, with swords and armour and dragons. It was quite a sight, the lot of you looming out of the darkness in the middle of the night. But when you said you wanted to negotiate a peaceful trade, I had far more reason than most in this village to believe you. And as with Nataya, I’ve seen nothing in your actions or behaviour to warrant any sort of suspicion. And I’m far too old to give a donkey’s behind whether some of the people here think I’m a daft old codger or not. So I support you, and I’ll do whatever I can to make sure this village gives you a fair go. But be warned, Koradan. One man cannot turn the tide of public opinion, even if he’s as stubborn as I am. There are people here who want you gone. And plenty more who haven’t decided yet.”
“I’m aware of the tension we’re creating,” Koradan said. “All we can do is keep upholding our end of the bargain and continue giving people every possible reason to begin to trust us. If that fails in the end, then we’ll leave peacefully. Unfortunately, that’s just the way things are.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lynette listened to the litany of curses as the four men manoeuvred Markon’s stretcher into his bedroom. It was late afternoon, the journey down the mountain having taken over an hour from start to finish.
“How do we get him onto the bed?” Mitch asked. Markon himself was bearing up reasonably well, having taking a good few swigs of the bottle of gin to dull the pain.
“Can each of you grab a corner of the blanket?” Lynette suggested. “And maybe another man in the middle of each side. Then you can just lift him up and I’ll drag the stretcher out from underneath him.”
“All right, where’s Alti? Alti! Get in here. We need a bit of help. And who else is around? Vin? Ace?”
“I can do it,” Paul said, rushing to get himself in position.
“He’s heavy lad,” Mitch cautioned him, though he didn’t refuse his help. “You ready to give a good, solid heave?”
“Ready,” Paul said, bracing himself. Lynette squeezed around to the end of the bed, ready to pull the stretcher away.
“Right then. On three. One, two… three!”
It went as smoothly as could be expected, Markon gasping out a curse, Hetti muttering and fretting over by the door, while Lynette moved the stretcher as quickly as she could manage. Then Markon was lying on the bed, as comfortable as he was likely to get in the near future.
“Now what?” Hetti asked. She’d been crying for much of the day, her eyes red and puffy now.
“Sue said she’ll stay and give you a hand,” Lynette told her. “I’ve put some herbs in the kitchen. He’ll need to have a cup of tea brewed for him every three hours. And if he wants more gin, he can have some after midnight. As for the rest of it, I’m going to go and have a long chat with Best and Peter to see if we can work out what we do next.” The two elderly men, while not medically trained, each had a wealth of experience, and aside from Lynette herself, they were the most likely to come up with any good ideas about how to treat Markon’s leg.
“Can I come?” Paul asked, eagerly following Lynette to the door. Out of sheer habit, she started to say no… but quickly reconsidered. Paul had been doing an awful lot of things in the past few days that she would normally have said no to, and doing them well. Perhaps she shouldn’t discount his help so quickly.
“Come along,” Lynette said, as they left Markon’s house. “But it’s not going to be a pleasant discussion. We have some tough decisions to make.”
They rounded up Peter and Best on their way back to Lynette’s house, pulling them away from their respective conversations. Much of the village was still loitering about in the street, catching up on all the news from the mine. And once the bare facts had been exchanged, there would be the inevitable sharing of opinions and discussions of every possible perspective on recent events. In a small town where nothing of importance ever happened, the past few days had generated enough news to last a month or more.
Once they were safely ensconced inside her house, Lynette sank into a chair and collapsed forward onto the kitchen table, absolutely exhausted, but knowing the work wasn’t finished yet. “Great gods, what a mess,” she muttered, wondering if she should drag out her bottle of whisky and offer it to the men. But then she remembered she’d given it to Koradan.
“So,” Best said, sitting down and shoving a chair towards Peter. He hobbled over and sat down heavily, before hanging his walking stick over the back of it. “Two steps forward, one step back. Lynette? You with us?” he prompted, when Lynette didn’t move. With an effort, she roused herself and sat up.
“Yes. Absolutely. So… Markon’s leg.”Concentrate, she schooled herself. They had a serious problem to solve, and they would need her input to solve it.
“Well, the first and most obvious option is to ask Markon what he wants to do about it,” Best pointed out. “Once he’s lucid enough to make a decision, that is. I know we have limited options, but we can’t just make a decision without his consent.”
“Hang on, where are we up to with this?” Peter asked. “I heard the short version when Best got back, but I don’t know the full story.”
“Both bones in his lower leg broken,” Lynette explained shortly. “In an ideal world, he needs to go to the hospital in Minia, but I don’t think he’d be able to make the journey. The other options are remove the leg from the knee down, or set it as best I can and spend the rest of his life providing continuous pain relief when it heals crooked.”
“That’s a fairly grim picture,” Peter said.
“Or we can come up with another option that’s going to give him a better chance of a useful life, without the treatment being worse than the injury.”
The four of them sat silently at the table, each turning the problem over in their minds. But every time Lynette tried to come up with a new solution, she kept circling back to the hospital. It was Markon’s best option for a healthy and useful life, if they could just manage to get him there. Was a four day trip really so out of the question? If she went along and they gave him plenty of care along the way? Was lying in a cart really so different from lying in a bed? They’d have to build a cover so he wasn’t in the sun all day, and so that he was sheltered in case it rained. And provide plenty of padding so he wasn’t jostled by every rock and pothole in the road.
But even then, she had her doubts, not so much about the journey as about the injury. The leg had been broken for three and a half days already. Another four days would make it a week in total. It was far from ideal for the time between breaking a bone and setting one.
“Maybe this is a crazy idea,” Paul said, “but is there a way we could somehow strap him onto one of the vreki? One of them flying him to Minia would be a lot quicker than taking a horse.”
In response, Best burst out laughing. “No offence, lad. It’s a fine idea, and a damn good example of ingenuity, but we’re talking aboutMiniahere. The city that guards the gate itself. Can you imagine what would happen if adragonlanded in the middle of a city full of warriors whose sole job is to kill the demons that try to fight their way through the gate? And I’m assuming that at least one of us would have to go with Markon. So that person is risking getting killed as well, if they just casually show up and announce they’ve flown in on a dragon. People would think they’re out of their mind.”
